In this article series, we’ll be revisiting and reviving the Insomnia project, a book designed to bring horror to your D&D game.
Unsleeping History
A peek in the rear view mirror is necessary before proceeding: what was Insomnia, what happened to it, and why bring it back now?
I originally planned for Insomnia to be a direct follow up to the original release of Dark Matter, and had many of the same design criteria: create an expansion to D&D 5e that gave you total freedom to bring the horror genre to your table using any of the book’s tools that you choose. Early in the design process, I had already written tens of thousands of words for Insomnia, of which only a fraction has been seen by anyone else. It includes some of the most bone-chilling and provocative writing of my life.
However, the scope and internal cohesion of Insomnia got away from me. In order to begin playing the settings, we needed a full suite of modern rules. In order to make those rules, we needed a metric ton of mundane equipment, AC rules, replacements for fantasy races, guidelines for how the internet works in a modern-ish game, and so on. Meanwhile, the settings began to clash with the monster narratives. How can the mysterious Starlight appear as a dense fog rolling into an empty field when you’re playing the sprawling noir cityscape setting? Contradictions and to-do lists piled up, and other, more pressing projects took priority. Eventually, Insomnia was indefinitely relegated to the back-burner, as dead as a project could be.
Revival
Fresh eyes and hindsight can do wonders for project scope. To say nothing of the fact that D&D is now my day job, as opposed to a dedicated hobby.
We intend for this article series, released twice-weekly, to lay the groundwork for reviving Insomnia. In it, we’ll provide overviews of everything in the book, excerpts from the book, rationales for our decisions, and polls for feedback. Each month, the sum of our efforts will become a Patreon release of modest budget.
What’s in Insomnia?
Insomnia is your horror toolkit, bringing the spine-tingling thrill of a masterful suspense novel, gory slasher film, or campy monster-of-the-week TV show to your tabletop through the medium of 5e. With it in hand, you can transform a single session or an entire campaign in a domain of dread for your players. Everything presented in this book is modular and optional. If it belongs in your 5e game, it belongs in Insomnia.
To use this book, simply pick a setting (including your own) and choose a singular monster.
Horrific Monsters
Insomnia presents each of its adventures as conflicts with a single monster that the characters must survive, investigate, and hunt, lest they be hunted themselves. In stark contrast to the power fantasy of other roleplaying games, the players aren’t brave heroes carving a swathe through foes on their way to a dramatic confrontation with a dragon. Instead, they’re trapped in a monster movie, hoping to survive for a few hours longer.
Hunt or Be Hunted
When a monster is on the loose, one of two things will happen: either it’ll pick off the characters one-by-one, or the characters will investigate it, uncover its weaknesses, corner it, and bring it down. None of these are small feats; each is fraught with peril, thrusting them into encounters with the monster or its minions. In the course of investigation, the characters might need to procure special weapons or resources, pull on threads of inquiry to meet people familiar with the monster, or simply spend a lot of time at the library. Every action brings them closer to an inevitable final confrontation with the monster, whether or not they’re ready for it.
Critical Weakness
Many things can be learned as the characters delve into investigation, from the monster’s origin, to how it kills, to the location of its lair, but the most important is undoubtedly the monster’s weakness. As invincible as any monster might seem, nearly every creature has an Achilles’ heel, some critical vulnerability that slows them down, undermines their powers, banishes them from time and space, or allows them to be slain. With the proper research, and a little bit of luck, the characters might be able to find some detail which gives them a fighting chance.
Sidebar: New Monsters, New Fear
If the players know exactly what to expect from a monster, it’s probably not a good fit for a horror campaign, especially if a monster has an easily-exploitable weakness. Players will probably expect zombies to be shambling minions, easily dispatchable with a blow to the head—nothing to be worried about. However, with some small changes, you can subvert player expectations and put them on the back foot. Sprinting zombies with no clear weaknesses, ambiguously dead zombies that rise back up at any moment, or zombies made from real, living people, who might be rescued from their fate, are all substantial remixes to the formula, and force players to improvise.
Each monster in Insomnia follows this spirit of rethinking tropes. The Vampire, clad in armor, is nothing like any vampire you’ve seen before. Our Imp is a colossal devil and a savvy manipulator, not a tiny minion. With any luck, the characters will interact with these monsters authentically, unsure what to expect, and constantly fearing reprisal.
Settings of Dread
Insomnia isn’t a sprawling campaign setting with lore and history that you’re expected to memorize. Instead, this book contains flexible outlines for three settings, giving you all the elements you need to populate a world, with enough flexibility to run your campaign in any way you like. Furthermore, every setting (including your own) is compatible with every monster in this book.
Something is Wrong Here
The best horror settings are monsters in their own right. The paint peeling on a once-opulent country home, the stench of rotten food seeping into the air, and the hostile stares of complete strangers signify that something is deeply wrong—you just can’t put your finger on it. Even comfortable settings, like a sleepy midwestern town, can be made horrific with the implication that something terrible lingers just under the surface, waiting to swallow you whole.
Nobody Can Hear You Out Here
The settings presented in this book share one important commonality: they are all divorced from the world beyond by sheer distance. This isolation carries a sense of threat all on its own: nobody can come help you, vital resources are out of reach, and the threat could be hiding anywhere around you. And of course, your cell phone doesn’t have any signal.
Not every horrific setting needs to or should share this oppressive isolation, but in Insomnia, this is a vital element that helps contain the threat and the characters, so as to facilitate a bone-chilling story.
Monster Incursions
When a foul creature drags itself out of the bowels of the earth, it rarely does so of its own accord. It might have been summoned by mad cultists, led to our world through an open portal, or forced to flee its dark home by something even more terrible. Whatever the reason, new and more horrific monsters will surely follow it.
A campaign in Insomnia consists of a string of monstrous invasions called an incursion. Once an incursion is begun, the very world is on a ticking clock—forfeit if the incursion is not halted. An incursion of undead threatens to overrun the world with ghouls, vampires, and wraiths; an eldritch incursion threatens to drive the world into a mad dark age under the foot of strange, elder gods; a daemonic incursion threatens to rain literal hellfire and damnation upon the earth. No matter its shape, combating the incursion is the final and greatest hurdle of any campaign.
A single adventure might be crafted around banishing or slaying a single monster, but a campaign should center on halting an incursion that grows more powerful with each passing hour.
Unraveling the Conspiracy
As the characters investigate individual monsters, they’ll also pick up hints about the larger mystery: why monsters are showing up in the first place. These clues might seem inscrutable at first, appearing as red herrings or lingering questions about the monster investigation at hand, but over the course of multiple investigations, the larger truth comes into focus: a full-scale incursion looms on the horizon.
This sets off a chain of questions to be unraveled as the characters combat their next monster: How are monsters arriving in our world and what sort of monster is coming next? Why are they coming to our world, and is anyone assisting them? How grave is the threat, and how long until it becomes unmanageable?
